Jigsaw

By Graham Nelson, October 1995 (Inform).
Review: Gareth Rees.

Jigsaw opens on the night of December 31st, 1999, at a
party to celebrate the new millennium. Feeling out of sympathy with the
thronging party-goers, and unable to find again the attractive stranger
in black who has just slipped away, you wander off to explore a
mysterious monument built by the late eccentric millionaire Grad
Kaldecki. You discover that Kaldecki has constructed - or somehow
obtained access to - a time machine. In the centre of the monument, the
time machine takes the baroque form of a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces
(once found) give access to turning points in twentieth century history.
Kaldecki planned to alter history, but died with his work barely
started, leaving his acolyte (the attractive stranger, soon capitalised
as Black) to complete his megalomaniacal scheme. Much against your
will, you find yourself trailing around the century in Black's wake,
trying to restore history to its rightful course, and searching for
hidden jigsaw pieces. You visit some of the most important moments in
twentieth century history: World War I, the Wright brothers, women's
suffrage, the Moon landings, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall. (Though not
every historian would place the writing of Proust's novel A la
Recherche de Temps Perdu in this list!) The quest is complicated
by a romance between you and Black, and by hints of metaphysical
significance when you enter a realm called 'The Land', whose
mist-shrouded locations are emblematic of the great themes: Art, Science
War and Nature.

It is often an axiom in time-cop novels that we live in the best of all
possible worlds, and that any kind of interference with history must be
disastrous. Jigsaw rigidly enforces this convention by
ending the game whenever the past is changed. This extreme historical
conservatism sits uneasily with some of the chapters: it is not clear
why eight million men had to die for the sake of the world as we know
it, nor what is so bad about the world described in the following
paragraph that World War I was preferable:

You shake your head, confused. Why did the mad London-born
architect Kettering build this monument? Why did the government of
the Franco-British Republic ever allow Century Park to be built here
at Versailles? Never mind: time to go and get a drink of potato
brandy from the commissars and toast the new millennium.

Sometimes it is completely implausible that the disturbance
in the past could have led to the result you see. For example, in the
Suez Canal chapter, the wider outcome does not depend on your actions:
even though Black brokered a deal to prevent the Suez Crisis, the powers
that be always intended to renege on the deal.

Jigsaw is a huge game, one of the largest text adventures
ever written. It is made manageable only by its episodic structure:
each time zone can be treated more or less as a separate game, requiring
only those objects that are nearby to solve its puzzles. (Though there
are a few interconnections between the eras to make life interesting,
and attempts to use anachronistic objects inappropriately are often
amusing.) Jigsaw's puzzles are hard; often all you can do
is collect the available objects and fiddle with them, without any real
understanding of what your objective is until you've achieved it.
Particularly unfortunate in this respect are the Alexander Fleming,
women's suffrage and East Berlin chapters. A few other puzzles refer to
classic works of interactive fiction including Adventure,
Zork and Enchanter, and the novice without
this background will struggle.

Some of the puzzles, on the other hand, are inspired. In one chapter,
you find yourself at Bletchley Park in World War II and have to decrypt
a message encoded by the Enigma machine. Sweating away at this problem,
I suddenly realised that, whereas the usual derring-do of an adventure
game is only so much make-believe, in this case my task was made no
easier by its fictional nature. Of course, my 1940s counterparts faced
a more difficult Enigma machine - Nelson's being slightly simplified -
had to succeed without the benefit of information gained by supernatural
means, had no access to high-speed computers, and faced rather greater
consequences of failure than merely an unfinished game. I found myself
thinking, If Turing and Newman could do it, then surely I, with all
these advantages, can do it too!

The most interesting feature of Jigsaw is the way it deals
with Black's sex. By cunning paraphrase, Nelson manages to avoid ever
stating whether Black is male or female: knowing only that Black is
attractive to you, you are free to project your own preference onto the
situation. This is a more elegant device than the outright question
Are you male or female? or the various contrivances by which Infocom
games force a decision on you. Not every reader appreciates this
elegance: at least one person posting to rec.games.int-fiction, having
noticed that both you and Black are able to pass yourselves off
successfully in masculine roles, argued that you and Black must
therefore be gay men. But given the fantastic nature of the piece, and
the famous cases of women who have gone disguised as men for long
periods of time without detection, it is foolish to rigidly insist on
such an interpretation.

Jigsaw is Nelson's second game. His first,
Curses, grew by stages into a mish-mash of Celtic Druids
and King Arthur rubbing shoulders with classical Greek Gods and the
poems of T.S. Eliot. The effect is certainly startling, but I imagine
that a writer as attracted to elaborate formal structures as Nelson
could not be satisfied with the outcome. A new game gave him the
opportunity to make amends. The result is dominated by structures based
on the numbers 16 and 100. There are 16 time zones, 16 chapters, 16
jigsaw pieces, 16 animals to sketch, 16 locations in the Land and the
game starts with 16 minutes to go before the start of the new century.
There are 100 years in the Twentieth Century and 100 points to be
scored. There are also pairings of opposites: Prologue and Epilogue,
Black and White, nature and technology, the dead Land and the living
Land, the party at the end of the century and the party at the
beginning, the chapel unbuilt and the chapel disused.

At times I felt the correspondences and allegory were too obvious and
too much; Black's schematic role rather overshadows the tentative story
of Black's relationship with the player (and this is not helped by the
flexible order of the chapters). Jigsaw also lacks the
excitement and unpredictability which Curses achieved by
being so chaotic.

Still, Jigsaw is extremely good by the standards of
existing text adventure games, and certainly good enough to be worth
paying the compliment of taking it seriously. Although it adopts a
traditional puzzle-based style of game-play, and doesn't make any
technical advances beyond the state of the art, it does wonders with the
limited techniques at its disposal. Everyone who enjoys text adventures
should play it.